


Shadowy Matters

by orphan_account



Series: Dark Matter AU [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Amnesia, Dark Matter AU, M/M, Pain, Sniper Lance (Voltron), Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-15
Updated: 2016-11-15
Packaged: 2018-08-31 02:49:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8560636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Shance Week, Dark Matter AU Shiro knows he's a criminal, that he's done terrible things. That, in spite of his memories being gone, that he is a living breathing killing machine and that the rest of the crew of The Castle is just as bad. Most of them. Except for Blue. And so when the chance to take Blue home, to keep his hands clean, he jumps. It doesn't go well.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Literally based upon a dream I had. Short and painful. 
> 
> Shiro thinks of himself as Shiro, but the others by their color. They, likewise, think of him as Black. Everyone is humanoid but none are actually human. Pidge and Matt are of an Avian race, Allura is Altean, Keith is Galra/Altean, Hunk, Shiro, and Lance are...other things I haven’t given names to yet.

 

In hindsight Shiro should have realized it was an ambush. Green managing to find a lead on Blue after all this time, a small glimmer of information that lead them to some backwoods planet out of the edge of system 23-B67. It was just too random that after not being able to find a much as a birth record or fingerprint scan that they'd suddenly come across a missing person’s report with a picture of Blue’s smiling face on it. 

Green had been suspicious, as she often was, but had admitted the planet was so small and its infrastructure about 200 years behind what was on The Castle so it was  _ possible _ it was legit and had just slipped through her search net until then. But, she’d added darkly, not  _ likely _ . She didn’t miss things and her hidden nets in the Galra information stream were near flawless. But unlikely or otherwise they'd all agreed they had to do it.

They had all gotten bits and pieces about their lives except Blue. And yeah, for the most part they all wished they didn't know that they were actually a group of murders, guilty of staging coups and uprisings, had committed treason by way of murder, had spilled so much blood they were drowning in it. They hadn't been nice people before whatever incident had wiped out their memories, so much so that they were capture or kill on sight targets in Galra territory and the bounties on their heads were so huge Shiro sometimes worried about being betrayed by the others. 

And he found he couldn’t blame the Empire for wanting them dead. If even half of the information out there on the information stream was true they deserved it. All of them. Really really deserved it. 

Except, perhaps, for Blue. On him there was nothing. No criminal record based on facial scans or fingerprints or biosignatures. Not even among the unsolved crimes they’d combed through did there see to be anything that could link up to him. Blue was no one it seemed, really and truly. Why he had been with them was...just beyond Shiro. 

But the notion of him as a missed and loved boy from a backwater planet, with one mother a merchant and the other a farmer and host of younger siblings all eager for his return? That maybe he’d struck out from his tiny planet and ended up on their ship, maybe seeking transport or something like that, with no idea of what he was getting into? That made sense to him. Blue was smart and genuine, a little cheesy and loud and overbearing, occasionally obnoxious and capable of rubbing almost everyone the wrong way without even trying, but he was kind and Shiro couldn’t imagine he’d ever done a bad thing in his life or had a single terrible thought. 

Not like the rest of them. 

Not like Shiro who could slide into a mindless killing state, arm transforming into a deadly weapon even Hunk and Pidge didn’t totally understand, in spite of their many scans and all the poking and prodding that had happened, who could lay waste to an entire drone or military unit on muscle memory alone. His mind fell away, became a red haze of fury and buzzing sound, and he was just...a body. A thing that could, and would, kill without a hesitation, without thought. 

He terrified himself. Sat up at night and wondered what he was, who had made him like this, why him...why all of this? Had there ever been any goodness in him or had he always been this thing with blood seeping between the gears in his arm? 

That was why he didn’t mind being the one to ‘babysit’ Blue. He was something that wasn’t...wasn’t like everything else. No apparent darkness in his past, no skeletons or spirits clinging at the hems of his tunic. Nothing dimming the brightness of his eyes. Perhaps...perhaps Shiro hoped that even a fraction of that brightness would wear off on him. 

That maybe when he got his memories back he’d be able to hold onto it and have more than this seemingly endless, mindless dark place inside of him that he disappeared into in battle. 

That was why he’d been happy to volunteer to bring Blue planetside to meet with his supposed family, when all the others had been wary of making the trip. He didn’t blame them for that but he also couldn’t let Blue go alone or pass up on a chance to maybe get the fuck away from them. He’d be better off somewhere else, with better people. Without mercenaries, the Galra, the corporations, and everyone else under the suns trying to kill them. Without having to risk getting his hands bloody too.

It had started out well enough. A man and a woman who cried about missing their son answered their hail but hadn’t been able to get on visual coms. Not enough power to get through the very magnetic atmosphere of the planet, supposedly, and Pidge had confirmed that was true enough. Suspicious but...true. 

So they’d come down in the shuttle, pulled into the rundown looking station they’d been directed too. He’d reached out and squeezed Blue’s hand, felt his elevated warmth and, as he thumbed along his pulse point, how hard his hearts were beating. 

“What if this is it?” Blue had asked, blue eyes gleaming in the pale blue light of the shuttle. His pastel horns were polished to perfection, skin oiled, his claw tipped fingers painted, and the golden bands he rarely wore ringing his tail; it was how his people made themselves ‘presentable’ to meet others, or so the information stream had told them when they looked it up. 

He wanted to look nice, just in case this was really his family and so Shiro had helped him out, stolen the oils from Allura, the paints and makeup from Hunk, helped him get his horns shined. He looked...nice. But worried, darkly lined eyes wide and nervous. 

“You don’t want to go home?” Shiro had asked, squeezing his hand. “I know you don’t want to hang out with us any longer than you have to. Running from people. Getting shot at, held hostage, working merc jobs? You’re better than that.” 

Blue had blinked then looked away, sliding his hand free of Shiro’s grip. “Let’s go.” 

They’d stepped off the shuttle and had been greeted by not the two pleased parents but by a small army of Galra, weapons armed and ready to blow them to hell. Come quietly, they’d said, or be eliminated. Give us the Altean Princess and Galra traitors, blah blah, the usual party lines. And then the haze had come. It didn’t matter that he was outnumbered, vastly outnumbered, that he could only do so much while keeping his eye on Lance (and he would, even in the blood haze). It was a fight and he could fight. 

All he knew was the fight. 

It was like it always was. He pushed Lance aside, back behind some crates with an order to get on the shuttle and leave now, and then he charged into the thick of things, arm powering up, pistol finding his other hand, and thoughts dropping away. Blood pulsed in his veins, gripped him and moved his body around, made him stronger, faster: better. 

Bodies fell under his hands, under the fire of his blaster. The drones sparked and broke apart, leaking oil and hydraulic fluid that mixed with the Galra blood on the floor. The bloodlust grew, slithered in his gut like a living thing, demanded he do more, kill more, tear them apart. 

He was...this was what he was meant to do. What felt right, blood on his hands and under his feet and splattering his skin. 

That he couldn’t win didn’t matter. The blaster bolts that hit him, burned and sizzled his skin while biting deep into his flesh, didn’t hurt. The blows he took, heavy and fortified with armor, barely tickled. That he was bleeding, slowing down, meant nothing to him. Death meant nothing, not like this.  

Kill, give Lance time to escape, take them all with him. He was the Champion, he was-

A blaster bolt singed his ear and pierced the helmet of a Galra close to him, a neat little hole right between where his eyes must have been. He noted it but didn’t stop, kept going even as bodies dropped around him, perfect shots in vital areas each and every time. 

And then it was over and he was sliding down against a wall, staring up at Blue. Blue who was up on some scaffolding, holding a sniper blaster in his hands and staring back down at him. 

\---

Blue was suspiciously absent once they got back to the Castle. Shiro was hauled off, patched up, pumped full of painkillers, allowed to sleep in the infirmary through the night (or maybe it was two) and then dumped into his quarters to watch the lovely shadows dancing on his ceiling. The drugs wouldn’t last long in his system now that he wasn’t getting a steady drip, they never did. Whatever it was that he was processed the drugs quickly, left him back in pain relatively quickly, but he tried to enjoy it while it lasted.

He would heal fast too. Too fast, so fast he would have to hide it from the others just like every other time he was injured. It would cause too many questions. Make them want to know what the fuck he was when even he couldn't answer that question just yet. 

He glanced up when Blue came in, waved at him to come deeper into his dim room. 

“Hey.” 

“Hey.” Blue said as he sat down gingerly on the side of his bunk. “You okay?”

Shiro hummed thoughtfully then nodded. “I’ll heal. How about you?” 

“Me?” Blue asked, blinking as if the question shocked him. “Why...why wouldn’t I be okay? I mean. So we walked into a trap because of me. And you almost died. And I...picked up a weapon I didn’t know I could use and made crazy accurate shots to kill something like a dozen people and I don’t...I don’t know if that’s a thing I do, have always been able to do, or if it’s...another. Thing. Or part of the dreams. Maybe. I...I killed people. Bad people. Terrible, they were going to kill you. Were hurting you but I’ve never...it’s-”

He was shaking, hands balled up and tears starting to fall from his eyes. “I killed those people.”

“Hey.” Shiro made himself sit up in spite of the ache in his body and the burning in his lungs. In spite of the sadness trying to rise up in his throat and smother him. “Hey. C’mere Blue. ...Lance.”

Blue gasped, shook harder as the tears spilled over, inhaled and then he lunged forward and Shiro’s body screamed in pain even as he closed his arms around him and held him as close as he could. “I thought I didn’t want to go. That I wanted to stay with you! ...I mean all of you. ...but you, mostly.” 

“Oh.” That was new. 

Lance’s hand curled in his shirt, gripping and tugging the fabric. “I thought I could be like all of you. Be part of the crew but I don’t think I can. Black, I don’t...I keep seeing it. I can’t sleep. I can’t do anything. I don’t want this!” 

“I know.” He said as he smoothed a hand down Lance’s back. “I know.” 


End file.
